All the King's Men (10 page)

“The bond issue was for building a schoolhouse,” I said, “and it looks like Lucy figures they might keep some of it for that purpose.”

“Who the hell is Lucy?”

“Lucy is the school-teacher,” I said.

“She won’t be a school-teacher long,” he said. “Not on the Mason County payroll if she keeps that up. Not if I know Mason County.”

“Lucy don’t favor drinking either,” I said.

“Was it you or the other guy popped Lucy?” he demanded. “You know so much about Lucy.”

“I just know what Willie told me.”

“Who the hell is Willie?”

“Willie is the fellow with the Christmas tie,” I said. “He is Cousin Willie from the country. He is Willie Stark, the teacher’s pet, and I met him in the back room of Slade’s place a couple of months ago and he told me Lucy didn’t favor drinking. I’m just guessing about her not favoring stealing.”

“She don’t favor Willie being County Treasurer either,” Jim Madison allowed, “if she is the one putting him up to what he is doing. Doesn’t she know they run things up in Mason County?”

“They run ‘em up there just like they run ‘em down here,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm’s length and let it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep, Kelly-green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building. He watched it fall, and said again, “Yeah, but you leave down here and go on up there.”

So I went up to Mason City in the Model-T, and kept my jaws clamped tight when I went over the washboard and hung to the steering post when I went over the sideslipping dust, and that was a very long time ago.

I got to Mason City early in the afternoon and went to the Mason City Café, Home-Cooked Meals for Ladies and Gents, facing the square, and sampled the mashed potatoes and fried ham and greens with pot-likker with one hand while with the other I competed with seven or eight flies for the possession of a piece of custard pie.

I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so I said howdy-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town like Mason City the bench in front of the harness shop is–or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down–the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the local undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But if you are sitting on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in late August with the old ones, it does not seem that anything will ever come, not even your funeral, and the sun beats down and the shadows don’t move across the bright dust, which, if you stare at it long enough, seems to be full of glittering speck like quartz. The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your categories are altered. Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away. You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight
râle
_ of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlight detachment and comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the toils of mortal compulsions.
I seen Sim Saunders done built him a new barn.
_Then,
Yeah, some folks thinks they is made of money.
_ And,
Yeah.
_

So I sat there and waited. And one of them said it, and another one leaned and shifted the quid and answered, and the last one said, “Yeah.” Then I waited again for a spell, for I knew my place in the picture, and then I said, “They tell me there’s gonna be a new schoolhouse.” Then I waited another spell while the words died away and it was as though I hadn’t said anything. Then one of them let the ambeer drop to the dry ground, and touched the spot with the end of the hickory stick, and said, “Yeah, and steam heat, hear tell.”

And Number Two: “Give them young ‘uns pneumony, steam heat.”

And Number Three: “Yeah.”

And Number Four: “If’n they git hit built.”

I looked across the square at the painted clock face on the courthouse tower, which was the clock the old ones kept time by, and waited. Then I said, “What’s stopping ‘em?”

And Number One: “Stark. Thet Stark.”

And Number Two: “Yeah, thet Willie Starl.”

And Number Three: “Too big fer his britches. Gits in the courthouse and gits his front feet in the through, and gits too big fer his britches.”

And Number Four: Yeah.”

I waited, then I said, “Wants ‘em to take the low bid, they tell me.”

And Number One: “Yeah, wants ‘em to take the low bid and git a passel of niggers in here.”

And Number Two: “To put white folks out of work. Builden hit.”

And Number Three: “You want to work longside a nigger? And specially him a strange nigger? Builden schoolhouse or backhouse, how so be hit?

And Number Four: “And white folk needen work.”

And Number One: “Yeah.”

Yeah,
_I said to myself,
so that is the tale
_, for Mason County is red-neck country and they don’t like niggers, not strange niggers anyway, and they haven’t got many of their own. “How much could they save,” I asked, “taking the low bid?”

And Number One: Couldn’t save enuff to pay fer bringen no passel of niggers in here.”

“Putten white folks out of work,” Number Two said.

I waited till it was decent, then I got up and said, “Got to be moving. Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

One of the old ones looked up at me as though I had just come, and said, “What you work at, boy?”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Porely?” he asked.

“Not porely,” I said. “It is just I lack ambition.”

Which was God’s truth, I reckoned, as I walked on down the street.

I reckoned, too, that I had killed enough time and I might as well go to the courthouse and get my story in the way I was supposed to get it. All this sitting around in front of harness shops was not the way any newspaperman would go about getting his story. There isn’t ever anything you get that way which you can put into a newspaper. So I went on over to the courthouse.

Inside the courthouse, where the big hall was empty and shadowy and the black oily floor was worn down to humps and ridges under your feet and the air was dry and dusty so that you felt in the stillness that you were breathing in the air from all the talk, loud and little, there had been in there for seventy-five years–well, inside there, just off the hall I saw some men sitting in a room. Above the doorway there was a tin sign with the letters about faded off. But they still said
Sheriff
_.

I went into the room where the three men were cocked back in split-bottom chairs and an electric fan set on top of the roll-top desk was burring away with little effect, and said howdy-do to the faces. The biggest face, which was round and red and had its feet cocked on the desk and its hands laid on its stomach, said howdy-do.

I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to him. He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm’s length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, the he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank. Then he laid the hand with the card in it back down on his stomach, where it belonged, and looked at me. “You done come a piece,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“What you come fer?”

“To see what’s going on about the schoolhouse,” I said.

“You come a piece,” he said, “to stick yore nose in somebody else’s bizness.”

“That’s right,” I agreed cheerfully, “but my boss on the paper can’t see it that way.”

“It ain’t any of his bizness either.”

“No,” I said, “but what’s the ruckus about, now I’ve come all that piece?”

“It ain’t any of my bizness. I’m the Sheriff.”

“Well, Sheriff,” I said, “whose business it it?”

“Them as is tending to it. If folks would quit messen and let ‘em”

“Who is
them?

_”Commissioners,” the Sheriff said. “The County Commissioners, the voters of Mason County done elected to tend to their bizness and not take no butten-in from nobody.”

“Yeah, sure–the Commissioners. But who are they?”

The Sheriff’s little wise eyes blinked at me a couple of times, then he said, “The constable ought to lock you up fer vagruncy.”

“Suits me,” I said. “And the
Chronicle
_ would send up another boy to cover my case, and when the constable pinched him the
Chronicle
_ would send up another one to cover that case, and after a while you’d get us all locked up. But it might get in the papers.”

The Sheriff just lay there, and out of his big round face his little eyes blinked. Maybe I hadn’t said anything. Maybe I wasn’t there.

“Who are the Commissioners?” I said. “Or maybe they are hiding out?”

“One of ‘em is setten right there,” the Sheriff said, and rolled his big round head on his shoulders to indicate one of the other fellows. When the head had fallen back into place, and his fingers had let go my card, which wafted down to the floor in the gentle breeze from the fan, the little eyes blinked again and he seemed to sink below the surface of the roiled waters. He had done his best, and now he had passed the ball.

“Are you a Commissioner?” I asked the fellow just indicated. He was just another fellow, made in God’s image and wearing a white shirt with a ready-tied black bow tie and jean pants held up with web galluses. Town from the waist up, country from the waist down. Get both votes.

“Yeah,” he said.

“He’s the head man,” another fellow said, reverently, a little old squirt of a fellow with a bald knotty old head and a face he himself couldn’t recollect from one time he looked in the mirror to the next, the sort of a fellow who hangs around and sits in a chair when the big boys leave one vacant and tries to buy his way into the game with a remark like the one he had just made.

“You the Chairman?” I asked the other fellow.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You mind telling me your name?”

It ain’t no secret,” he said. “It is Dolph Pillsbury.”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Pillsbury,” I said and held out my hand. Not getting up, he took it as though I had offered him the business end of a cottonmouth moccasin in shedding time.

“Mr. Pillsbury,” I said, “you are in a position to know the situation in regard to the schoolhouse contract. No doubt you are interested in having the truth of that situation made public.”

“There ain’t any situation,” Mr. Pillsbury said.

“Maybe there isn’t any situation,” I said, “but there’s been a right smart racket.”

“Ain’t any situation. Board meets and takes a bid what’s been offered. J. H. Moore’s bid, the fellow’s name.”

“Was that fellow Moore’s bid low?”

“Not egg-zackly.”

“You mean it wasn’t low?”

“Well–” Mr. Pillsbury said, and his face was shadowed by an expression which might have been caused by a gas pain, “well, if’n you want to put it that a-way.”

“All right,” I said, “let’s put it that way.”

“Now look a-here–” and the shadow passed from Mr. Pillsbury’s face and he sat up in his chair as suddenly as though he had been stuck by a pin–”you talk like that, and ain’t nuthen done but legal. Ain’t nobody can tell the Board what bid to take. Anybody can come along and put in a little piss-ant bid, but the Board doan have to take it. Naw-sir-ee. The Board takes somebody kin do the work right.”

“Who was it put the little piss-ant bid in?”

“Name of Jeffers,” Mr. Pillsbury said peevishly, as at an unpleasant recollection.

“Jeffers Construction?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong with Jeffers Construction?”

“The Board picks the fellow kin do the work right, and it ain’t nobody’s bizness.”

I took out my pencil and a pad of paper, and wrote on it. Then I said to Mr. Pillsbury, “How’s this?” And I began to read to him: “Mr. Dolph Pillsbury, Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners of Mason County, stated that the bid of J. H. Moore for the construction of the Mason County School was accepted, even though it was not the low bid, because the Board wanted somebody ‘who could do the work right.’ The low bid, which was submitted by the Jeffers Construction Company, was rejected, Mr. Pillsbury stated. Mr. Pillsbury started further–”

“Now look a-here–” Mr. Pillsbury was sitting very straight up as though it were not a pin this time but a hot tenpenny and in the brown–”now look a-here, I didn’t state nuthen. You write it down and claim I stated it. Now you look a-here–”

The Sheriff heaved massively in the chair and fixed his gaze upon Mr. Pillsbury. “Dolph,” he said, “tell the bugger to git out of here.”

“I didn’t state nuthen,” Dolph said, “and you git out!”

“Sure,” I said, and put the pad in my pocket, “but maybe you can kindly tell me where Mr. Stark is?”

“I knowed it,” the Sheriff exploded and dropped his feet off the desk with a noise like a brick chimney, and heaved up in the chair and glared apoplectically at me. “That Stark, I knowed it was that Stark!”

“What’s wrong with Stark?” I asked.

“Jesus Gawd!” roared the Sheriff, and his face went purple with congestion of language which couldn’t get out.

“He’s biggety, that’s what he is,” Mr. Dolph Pillsbury offered. “Gits in the courthouse and gits biggety, he–”

“He’s a nigger-lover,” the little old bald, knotty-headed fellow submitted.

“And him, him–” Mr. Pillsbury pointed at me with an air of revelation–”I bet he’s a nigger-lover, comen up here and sahayen round, I bet he–”